For many hams, the morse code is beautiful. There is a definite art to mastering the ways of the key. Many hams regard morse code to be the very essence of the hobby. In fact, when a ham dies, he/she is reverently referred to as a "silent key".

To anyone who would say that the code is useless - give me one other form of communication whereby a man trapped under tons of rock can still communicate with rescuers, despite a crushedlarynx, or where someone who has had their face blown off in battle can still communicate with doctors and nurses.

The lengths of the morse code elements are approximately defined with the length of the dot. Dash is three times as long as a dot.
Spaces between letter elements are "dot-long", spaces between letters are dash-long. You simply make a little bit wider space between words and a minus (-...-) between statements.

Besides morse code itself I find very amusing a whole lot of abbreviations and acronyms. It is tedious to transmit and receive long words of human language so we rather TX ES RX (transmit and receive). There are written and unwritten codexes for these. Some of them are standardized like Q-codes (used widely in marine, aviation, ham and other communications), international standard abbreviations (a thick book which was used in marine communications and enabled two people to communicate without knowing each other's language), others are not (hamradio, CB, ...).

The timing of the code makes it easy to tell the difference between letters, until you get into the very high (30-40 words per minute) range.

To make it easier, many folks use something called Farnsworth Code or Farnsworth Weighting. If you were sending a message to someone that understood morse at about 5 words per minute (WPM), you could send the dits and dahs at a higher rate but left more blank time between the letters. The white space between the letters allows the receiver to translate the morse.

The United States FCC decided to go along with the rest of the world and lower the code test for amateur radio operators to five words per minute. With newer digital signaling technologies, morse is going by the wayside.

A way to learn the morsecode is to encode each letter as a word beginning by said letter, and to use it's AEIUYs as dots and Os as dashes. Here's a french version, /msg/blab me if you find or invent an english.

Samuel F. B. Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, did not invent
the telegraphic code that now bears his name. Actually, today's morse
alphabet is far removed from the system he envisioned for the telegraph.
It consisted only of dots, which expressed numbers, and most common
words and each letter had its own number. This is similar to the
Dian-Ma codes used in Chinese telegraphy.

The one who introduced truly alphabetic telegraphy, with signals of
differing duration (dot and dash) was Alfred Vail. He invented what
was known as American Morse, which was used on landline telegraphs
in the United States until the mid-20th
century. But even this is not what is known as morse code today. What
happened?

When telegraphy was introduced in Germany, the engineer Frederick
Clemens Gerke was set with the task of translating Vail's book on
telegraphy into German. He discovered that the alphabet could easily
confuse the receiving operator, so he proceeded to simplify it. He
removed differing intra-character spacings, and dashes of different
lengths, so that he ended up with a morse code with only two element
lengths (dot and dash), not unlike the present system.

The current morse code consists of 5 code elements. These are the dot,
the dash, the intra-character space, the inter-character space, and the
inter-word space. Their duration depends on the speed of sending, but
they have the same relative duration regardless of speed. This relative
duration is based on the length of the dot.

All elements in a character are separated by a period of silence
equal in duration to a dot.

One dash equals three dots.

Characters are separated by a period of silence equal in duration
to a dash.

Words are separated by a period of silence equal in duration to two
dashes.

Note that these are only platonic ideals; these official durations can
be and are deviated from in hand-sent morse. This applies in particular
to the so-called Farnsworth method, in which the inter-character spaces are
lengthened. This is used in particular when practicing morse code, where
the characters are sent at a speed of 15 WPM, but the overall text is
slower because of lengthened inter-character-spaces, typically as low as 5
WPM. This is to allow the student to focus on the overall sound of the
character, while still not overwhelming him or her with lots of text
that has to be buffered in the mind.

Apart from this, telegraphy sent with computers or electronic keyers
more or less perfectly follow standard element durations. It is
particularly important not to lengthen intra-character spaces, or
shorten inter-character ones, as this would make it very difficult to
hear the character boundaries.

When printing code charts, it is customary to use markings that have the
same relationship in length as the actual code elements have in
duration. When this is not technically feasible, such as here on E2,
the period and the hyphen-minus are used for the dot and the dash,
respectively. Intra-character spacing is not given any written
representation.

In the cases where there is more than one text character per code
character, this means that it depends on context or language. For
instance, .--.- means á in e.g. French messages, and å in
e.g. Swedish messages.

Editor's note:The system described below is called American Morse Code, and is the original code developed by Samuel Morse. Unlike modern international morse code, American morse code made use of spaces inside of individual letters, such as O and C. These intra-letter spacings were eliminated with the development of international morse code in Germany in 1848, which changed the way the numbers and eleven of the letters were encoded. The new letters are given in the last section, but the new numbers are not. American morse code became obsolete in the 1960s. Please see the other writeups in this node for international morse code. This definition has been retained for its historic value.

Morse" code" (?). (Teleg.)

The telegraphic code, consisting of dots, dashes, and spaces, invented by Samuel B. Morse. The Alphabetic code which is in use in North America is given below. In length, or duration, one dash is theoretically equal to three dots; the space between the elements of a letter is equal to one dot; the interval in spaced letters, as O . ., is equal to three dots. There are no spaces in any letter composed wholly or in part of dashes.